When Love Comes to Town – Paul Louis Metzger on John's Gospel

I’ve preached through the gospel of John a couple of times in my ministry, and each time, I bought more commentaries. The Book of John is pure profundity wrapped in simplicity. It’s deeply complex and linguistically simple at the same time. Very few commentaries dive deeper than the simplicity of the text itself.

Paul Louis Metzger, however, has done an amazing job of probing not only the gospel of John, but the human heart as well in his new commentary, The Gospel of John: When Love Comes to Town (Resonate Series). From the very preface of the book, I was engaged. As I skipped along to sections covering my favorite chapters and portions, I was delighted by new insights at every turn.

A good friend of mine often says that everyone has a desire to be “deeply known and loved,” and Metzger makes the point that the incarnation of Jesus (the arrival of the God-man in flesh on earth) was God’s ultimate way of touching the very deepest needs in the human heart. John brings us to the culmination of this loving touch in the cross and resurrection, to which he surprisingly devotes half of his entire evangelistic record.

There are plenty of commentaries on John available, but what I yearned for in my own preaching were books that would help me connect the text to the lives of the people in the pew, and that’s what the Resonate Series seems to do. This is the first commentary in the series that has crossed my desk, but I’m definitely looking forward to more!

Disclosure: I was given a free copy of this book for review, but was not asked to give a positive review. The links above are affiliate links and I would earn a small commission from any purchases made using them.